The growth in information and services available to the consuming, business and professional public in recent years had led to a rapid increase in the number and types of publications available for use by consumers, businesspersons, members of the licensed professions, and many others.
One particular area of growth has been in periodical publications, e.g. magazines or journals, which are generally soft bound, carry news of current events or developments, and appear at regular intervals, typically weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Many such periodicals include a relatively large number of entries or articles in each issue. Often for reasons of subject matter or time limitations, persons interested in the subject matter of the periodical as a whole are not interested in every single article or entry.
Given a reader's interest in some, but not all of the articles in such a publication, and given the time limitations involved in reading such materials, as well as the conditions under which they often are read, e.g. during travel periods or other interrupted intervals which arise in business situations, two particular features of using such periodicals become inconvenient to the reader. First, the necessity and difficulty of returning to the table of contents to review which articles are of interest and their respective locations, and second, keeping one's place in the midst of an article or between articles when the reader is interrupted in order to peruse desired articles. A typical periodical reader must either turn through every single page of the periodical or must continually refer to the table of contents, which is often hard to find in a soft-bound periodical, especially one that has been used. For example, once a magazine loses its cover, finding the table of contents among a hundred or more identically appearing pages can be quite difficult. Second, if the reader is interrupted before completing an article of interest, retaining one's place can be difficult, as traditional bookmarks are not as firmly held by soft-bound periodicals as they are by paperback books or hard-bound books.
It is accordingly an object of this invention to provide a table of contents which is particularly suitable for quick and easy reference in periodicals regardless of the condition or previous use of the periodical.
It is another object of this invention to provide a convenient means for marking one's place in such a periodical where the use of a usual type of bookmark is inconvenient, impractical, or even impossible.
It is yet another object of this invention to provide a combination bookmark and table of contents for use with such periodicals in which the table of contents or a reprinted version of it can be positioned and secured in position at any desired page location in the periodical and then can be removed and repositioned at another page location as the reader so desires.